A Note on the Spelling
of Arabic Words
There are conventions for transliterating Arabic, using diacritical marks and sym-
bols for letters to indicate exactly how the words should be pronounced, because
Arabic is a phonetic language. But the text sticks to standard formats for many
names and terms as they have tended to appear in the media over the years, and in
other cases they are rendered in a manner that closely resembles the way they are
heard when pronounced by Arabic speakers, usually in the relevant dialect. I’ve
used the spelling “Gaddafi,” instead of Qaddafi and other variants, and the spelling
“Mohammed” in most cases because it is the most common form one comes across,
although “Muhammad” would be more phonetically correct. The definite article is
rendered with the conventional English “al” in most cases, or “el” where the person
referred to normally spells the name in that fashion or if it has tended to appear
that way in the media. This is despite the fact that both “al” and “el” mislead a
reader in pronunciation, because in Arabic grammar the definite article is in fact
the single letter “l,” preceded by a default “i” if there is no supplying vowel from a
preceding word (so it’s usually “il”). Either way, in the case of certain letters the arti-
cle is elided with the first letter of the following defined word. Arabic long vowels
have generally been avoided, while the letters hamza and ‘ayn appearing midword
have been rendered with an apostrophe, so that, for example, the Al Jazeera show
is written as al-Ittijah al-Mu’akis. The ‘ayn when appearing as the first letter of an
Arabic word has been marked in transliteration by an apostrophe when relating
technical terms, so that the Arab world has been rendered al-‘alam al-‘arabi, for
example, but diacritical marks indicating long vowels have been left out entirely
and first letter hamzas are also omitted.
